So today is Open Access day. I am writing this late in the evening, following a busy day at work and away from the computer.
Writing this as late as I am, there have been some great posts already, none better than that by Neil. Tough to add to what he wrote.
Open Access has taken a special meaning for me as I have moved away from science. I come from a heritage where the favorite journals included journals by the ACS, an organization that has come to epitomize closed access to me. Back in the day, sitting in universities with free access to papers and journals, that journal access wasn’t democratic never really registered. Then I started working in industry, at a startup, and suddenly you had to be careful about which journals you could subscribe to as a company. As I moved further and further away from hands on science, at the same time becoming even more interested in disparate fields, access to a variety of journals became more important, and more difficult.
That’s when it really dawned on me. Just like the availability of data sets has always been a big deal, the availability of published content and perhaps even more importantly the data contained within was critical for the practice and understanding of science. Anything other than that was not science. Everyone should have access to the same scientific information (what that information should be is the subject of another post). It’s not even about who pays for it. It is science, and as such belongs to everyone.
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As probably has been said elsewhere many times, the current system with reviewers and journals was designed in a time where no such wide breadth of the internet as currently existed… And the result was the publishing houses that print and circulate the journals to get full control of the copyright and form a Mafiya (see Doctorow, Stross), I'd dare say similar to that of the music / film industry. And of course as businesses, for the publishing houses profit comes first and not the benefit for society.
As probably has been said elsewhere many times, the current system with reviewers and journals was designed in a time where no such wide breadth of the internet as currently existed… And the result was the publishing houses that print and circulate the journals to get full control of the copyright and form a Mafiya (see Doctorow, Stross), I'd dare say similar to that of the music / film industry. And of course as businesses, for the publishing houses profit comes first and not the benefit for society.
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[...] Deepak Singh: Just like the availability of data sets has always been a big deal, the availability of published content and perhaps even more importantly the data contained within was critical for the practice and understanding of science. Anything other than that was not science. Everyone should have access to the same scientific information (what that information should be is the subject of another post). It’s not even about who pays for it. It is science, and as such belongs to everyone. [...]
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